Another Quality Post
Last week I mentioned in several posts about being busy at work, well I finally have time to "reflect" on it.
We were launching a new part last week and bossman went to another state to launch that part at the customers plant. He called many, many, many times on Monday about issues he kept finding on our parts. Silly mistakes really, like forgetting to put parts on, assembling 2 different parts together, not sealing the bags we put our parts into, not firmly pushing the parts into their place, and placing labels upside down. Mistakes that shouldn't have been made had people been paying just a little bit of attention to what they were doing.
So I was running back and forth, taking the phones calls from bossman and relaying that information back to the floor. Nothing makes me more mad then silly mistakes of not paying attention. I was practically babysitting people on the floor, making sure they were doing things correctly.
Then come Wednesday I get a call from a different customer saying they were having an issue with a piece on our part falling off just by touching it. Of course that customer made it sound like the world was coming to an end, but in the end it wasn't anywhere near what they first said. Come to find out someone at our facility turned a pressure knob that should never be touched, causing a low weld pressure, hence causing the piece to fall apart. This is where I got the ass chewing. One guy at the customer seemed to think I would work harder on the problem if he started off right away being an ass and yelling. I couldn't believe how much he was yelling and I just found out about the problem when he called. I just don't understand that theory. Thank-god he had to leave for the day and I got to deal with someone much much nicer and understanding. That person is the one who got me to work harder and figure the problem out, not assman.
It really boils down to people not really paying attention to what they are doing. They speed through putting the parts together thinking they are making their quota (they have to make so many parts a day) but when the parts get inspected they really only did 50-75% of their quota because they made so many defects. I try to explain this to them but they don't get it.
Posted by Quality Weenie at September 28, 2004 03:26 PM